Lack of funding may burst China’s Green Dam

It has been a little over a year since news first broke about China's …

China's controversial porn filtering software, Green Dam Youth Escort, may be at the end of the road. The Beijing Times (via China Daily) reported that China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) has pulled funding on the project, and that efforts to secure more have not been successful.

Green Dam has a sordid history given its short lifespan. Last May, the Chinese government quietly ordered PC manufacturers to bundle the software with all computers sold in the country. The goal was to prevent children from seeing porn via a database of blocked sites that could be updated remotely. The software was also capable of performing semantic and image-based evaluation of incoming content.

Soon after the news broke, security researchers at the University of Michigan discovered a number of serious security vulnerabilities in Green Dam, saying that malicious websites could take advantage of the software and run arbitrary code on the user's computer. A code exploit was even posted on Wikileaks, and researchers further revealed that a large portion of the code in Green Dam appeared to have been stolen directly from commercial filtering programs in the US, including CyberSitter. (CyberSitter eventually sued the Chinese government for the alleged code theft.)

None of this seemed to faze China—until now, anyway. According to China Daily, MIIT had promised funding for development and a year of tech support to two companies behind Green Dam, but the teams have not received funding since May 2009. That's before news broke in the US about the project's existence in the first place, making us wonder whether China was ever as serious about Green Dam as it appeared.

Because of the lack of funding, the Chinese papers are now reporting that the project has been halted. One of the two companies is refuting that report, however; general manager of Beijing Dazheng Human Language Technology Academy Chen Xiaomeng said that the company simply stopped using its former office in Beijing and was not closing. He also said that the company would continue to provide free support to users, even without funding.